


The Secret of White Horse Hill

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Child Neglect, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Lots of things involving bones and cemeteries, Mental Health Issues, Mystery, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-03-13 21:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13579605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: After a series of unfortunate events, Finn and Lachesis have been relocated for their own protection into a rustic town in one of Leonster's scenic valleys. What trouble can a former elite soldier and an exiled princess get up to in such pastoral surroundings? Plenty, if the hills themselves are concealing some deep and troubling secrets. Modern-ish AU (late 1990s).





	1. The Vale of the White Horse

**Leonster, Twenty Years Ago**

"You do like your horses here," Lachesis said as the train made its way through the broad curve of the valley. Not that horses weren't beloved back home... but they weren't carved into the very hillsides at a scale they could be seen from twenty miles off.

They’d passed two smaller horses emblazoned on the hills as the train made its way toward their destination, but neither compared to the white horse above the small town that was to be their new home, an elegant mare with one proud leg frozen in mid-prance, a flowing tail and a glittering green eye. Lachesis caught the flash of the eye as the clouded parted above the softer green landscape and thought of the emerald pendant she’d had to pawn two years before. She still had hopes of getting it back someday… if they ever got to escape from this refuge that was little better than a prison.

And a prison it looked to her, this sleepy small town with a church spire anchoring one end and the slender smokestack of a cement factory at the other. Finn, who’d had so very little to say on the final day of their journey, carried their bags into the inelegant black taxi that conveyed them to their new home.

It had a name, Lachesis realized, for that was a thing they did in Leonster, naming the row houses and cottages to give them a sense of personality when to her eye they all looked much the same. 

“The Old Rectory,” she said aloud. “Was it?”

“It’s just a name,” said Finn, and she could hear the nothing-ness in his voice that’d been there yesterday and the day before and would probably be there tomorrow in spite of the green things in the little yard and the bits of stained glass in the windows.

The kitchen was well-stocked at least, and they ate their supper of fresh bread and mellow cheese and oranges in the oppressive near-silence before falling asleep in the rose-speckled bedroom of the refuge gifted to them by Earl Dorias.

Lachesis woke in the morning to the sound of rain on mullioned windows, and she shut her eyes tight against the gray skies and wished she were home.

-x-

It should’ve felt like coming home, thought Finn, or at least the closest thing to home left to him, but it didn’t. He’d been fond of this town once, with an nostalgic affection grounded in three summers spent here as a privileged and favored cadet, roaming the hills in the company of his dearest friend, secure in the knowledge that each time a train bore them back to the capital they were one step closer to some bright future.

“I didn’t know it was going to be _fire_ ,” he said aloud, for he’d developed the habit of talking to himself and was a little past caring if anyone heard. Lachesis for certain was used to it already, and she kept on pretending to sleep while he sat beside her, watching the rain stream in patterns down the windows. He studied the patterns for a while, mapping the imperfections in the glass in his mind, because there was nothing else left to do.

They were under orders to keep out of trouble and stay alive, and if they could manage that one day they might go back to their actual lives and careers and whatever was left to go back to. In the meantime, there was only this strange enforced vacation of sorts, a holiday that wasn’t a holiday and that had no promise of an end.

-x-

Life in a strange town with no structure to her hours was worse than boring, it was outright depressing to Lachesis. As she stared down the first week of days with no responsibility— not to her superiors, not to the people, not even to a goldfish— she wondered what the point was in even rising from the brass bed with its cabbage-rose coverlet. After three days, when things to eat in the kitchen grew scant (and Finn didn’t notice, but then again she hadn’t really seen him eating, much less cooking), she dressed herself in her nicest clothes as though arming for battle and actually went outside.

The first thing that struck her was the smell of earth and green growing things, and then she noticed the background twitter of the little birds in the hedgerow, and then Lachesis began to see the colors of late winter turning to spring in the front plot of The Old Rectory. The stroll down the main path to the heart of the town path was pleasant despite the clinging mist that left fat droplets beaded on every branch of the hedges, and Lachesis stopped at the first bake shop she saw to buy a cup of tea and an apple tartlet before going about her errands. As she stood beneath a dripping awning, nibbling the pastry while a blue-capped songbird eyed her in case she let fall any crumbs, Lachesis began to feel perversely content with her surroundings.

There really _wasn’t_ anything much here, except for common people going about their business like there weren’t wars and coups and murder just across the water. Maybe she could’ve despised these complacent people of the Leonster countryside, the grandsons of peasants and daughters of factory workers, but instead she decided to smile graciously as she walked among them, went into their little shops and spent the some of the money allotted to her and Finn along with the cottage.

And then she got up the next morning and did it again, and then again the day after that, until she lived in a strange approximation of the life Lachesis was raised to expect, where her toil consisted of shopping and her good works were patronizing business and being generally kind to people. If the shops of the old town path weren’t the grand gallerias of the world’s capitals, at least there were no photographers chasing her through the streets here.  
Was she happy buying trinkets made from beach glass wrapped in wire as a substitute for the jewels left in a safe-deposit box out of her reach? Did it bother her to watch through café windows at women pushing prams down the street when every chubby waving fist brought Diarmuid to mind?

Did it matter? Not when she was alive.

-x-

Finn was in the middle of a letter thanking Dorias for lending them a pair of fine horses, both retired from the fox hunts, for their amusement when Lachesis announced she wasn’t staying indoors a moment longer on a this rare cloudless day. As the horses weren’t at their disposal yet, they had to hike on foot over the downs to the crest of White Horse Hill. There, they settled in the center of the great mare’s glittering green eye, fully four feet across and made of wine bottles buried neck-first in the turf. From this vantage point, the sweep of the Vale and its ten thousand years of human history lay exposed.

“The smokestack spoils the view,” said Lachesis.

“Does it?”

Finn remembered the secrets of each bulge and hollow, learned over the three summers he’d been climbing the downs in Glade’s company, and he pointed out some of them to Lachesis now— the foundation lines of a vanished town, the intersection of two ancient roads where a rough-hewn stone commemorated one of the victories of Queen Nova, the remains of a prehistoric fort atop one hill, the long mound of a barrow where twenty-four ancient warriors lay sleeping.

“Wrapped in green velvet,” Lachesis said of the ancients as she twirled a long stem of grass in her fingers.

"It wasn't such a green valley then,” Finn replied. “A thousand years ago, it's said the chalk plains dazzled the eye, and the wind scoured the towns and churches relentlessly and the wells ran dry. The people gave up on the old town and moved it, every brick and stone and consecrated grave, two miles over to where it stands now.”

“What changed?”

“Nova’s victory lifted a curse on the land? I don’t know.” Finn stared into a white void next to his boot, the hole of a wine bottle likely taken by some souvenir hunter. “Now it’s a fight against the turf every year. If the White Horse weren’t kept up on a regular basis, even she would disappear. Every seven years they have a festival to recut her edges and freshen the chalk infill. It’s supposed to be a great deal of fun, but I wasn’t here at the right time to take part in it.”

“What sort of fun does one have cleaning a giant horse?”

“I think they roll cheese wheels down the hillside and dance around maypoles. That sort of festival,” said Finn. He thought he remembered something about the cheese wheels representing the sun, an echo of some ancient religion involving the sun and white horses, but perhaps that was something he and Glade had concocted together to explain the appeal of cheese racing. “And then sometimes they have to fix her up when people do silly things. I remember the second summer we were here, someone decided to make the horse a unicorn, spray painting silver and gold into the grass. Since that wasn't enough, another hooligan decided to add something to make our White Lady into a stallion. The townspeople had that all cleaned up by sundown.” 

“I think I’m glad we’re here,” said Lachesis after a few moments of the winds whistling down the vale. “It seems there’s no end of secrets beneath your green hills. That should keep us entertained.”

“That and whoever it is who’s arriving tomorrow to keep tabs on us,” said Finn as they began to make their way back down the slope.

“Excuse me?” said Lachesis, and there was something lovely in the way her hair fell over her shoulders as she spun to glare at him.

“Dorias isn’t just gifting us horses. He’s sending us… a friend.”

“What manner of ‘friend’?” she demanded, and Finn could only extend his empty hands to show he had nothing, less than nothing.

Well, maybe slightly more than nothing. A thin strand of hope, but not enough to placate Lachesis and therefore not worth mentioning.

**To Be Continued**


	2. The Old One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A visitor from the capital, a local prank that might not be a prank, and a hint dropped in a local pub set Finn and Lachesis on the trail of a mystery.

Finn was at his computer with headphones blocking out the world when the knock came on their door the following morning, so Lachesis got to peer through the spyhole to make sure their guest had reason to be there.

“Special delivery!”

The fish-eye lens showed Lachesis a vaguely familiar face and a set of military credentials. She opened the door to find a young man, a little taller and a little sturdier than Finn, who thrust a government bag filled with mail at her. She narrowed her eyes at this unprofessional behavior and was about to give him a piece of her mind when Finn's voice stopped her thoughts cold.

“Glade!”

"Finn, you rascal!"

And so Lachesis stood with the sack of mail in her hands as the two young men joined in the sort of battle-brother embrace she knew from watching her own brother and his friends, back in the golden days.

It had been quite some time since anyone had given her that kind of embrace. Lachesis dumped the mail on the kitchen table and glanced over the dull envelopes from government and financial institutions. There was only one sort of letter she really wanted.

"Are there any personal letters from overseas?" she asked.

"I wouldn't know," said Glade. "They didn't tell me what was in the bag, but that's everything I was given."

Nothing from Tirnanog meant no word of Diarmuid. Lachesis left the unwanted letters in a stack and told herself Finn could deal with them.

"So what are your thoughts on that nice message someone's left to the people of the Vale?" Glade asked, and Lachesis and Finn both stared in response to this nonsense.

"I don't know what you mean by message," Finn replied after glancing at Lachesis, "but we haven't left the cottage all morning."

“So it must’ve just happened, then?”

“ _What happened_?” Lachesis was tired of these mysteries.

"Did you see what someone's done to the White Horse?" asked Glade, his face lit up with a sort of puppy-dog enthusiasm in spite of his dismay.

”No. We were just there yesterday and nothing was amiss,” said Finn, and Lachesis could see a flicker of guilt pass over his face, like they might’ve somehow caused whatever trouble Glade kept dancing around.

Lachesis had an untroubled heart as they went out to the town path for a view of White Horse Hill, as she well knew they’d not touched so much as an old bottle yesterday on the slope. A light mist hung around the crest of the hill but the horse itself showed clearly, as did the new markings above it.

_HE WILL RISE ONCE MORE_

"Fools," Lachesis said under her breath. 

Finn said nothing. Glade looked them over a few times, again reminding Lachesis of a friendly dog sizing up new acquaintances, then asked, ”Do the pubs still open at noon in this town?"

"No, it's ten now," said Finn, and Lachesis bit her lip at this admission. She hadn't been paying much attention to his activities, imagining he'd mostly been "working" on his computer while she was out and about, and it occurred to her now that this might be a mistake.

"It's a quarter past ten," said Glade. "Let's get on with it."

So they retreated to the Green-Eyed Lady, a bright modern pub with flower-boxes in the windows and a charming sign bearing the White Horse and her sparkling eye out front, to discuss the scandal.

“This has been spruced up. We used to be able to scam a pint with a meal here even though we were underage,” Glade began, but Lachesis wasn’t interested in reminiscing over someone else’s childhood. 

"Do they imagine the horse will come alive and go racing across the hills?" she asked.

"Our White Horse is always called a mare, so I don't think so," Finn replied, but then the sprightly barkeep with flaming red hair put in a word as she set down three glasses of dark ale on the counter.

"Could be the Old Horse's time has come around again."

"I don't know what you mean by 'Old Horse,'" said Finn after they all blanked at her for several seconds.

The barkeep touched her finger to her mouth as though to convey she was letting them in on some secret.

"Before the White Lady was cut, another horse pranced on the hills, facing in the other direction. It's said that in dry, hot summers you can still see its ghost, like scorch marks on the grass."

More silence.

"I don't recall anything of the sort--" Finn began, and Glade completed the sentence with "Must not've been hot enough when we were around."

The barkeep held her secretive smile.

"Haven't you _ever_ been to the Old Horse pub across town?"

"No," said Finn and Glade in unison, and the vehemence in their voices made Lachesis smile over the rim of her glass.

"That's the place for local lore," said the barkeep, and it seemed to Lachesis her eyes were dancing. "Tell them Anna sent you."

-x-

"No," Finn said again as Lachesis led him out of the Green-Eyed Lady with one hand clasped around his wrist.

He and Glade weren't exactly telling the truth about never having set foot in The Old Horse, because they'd been inside precisely twice and bailed out both times. The Old Horse was known for tolerable beer and miserable food and a general air of uncleanliness, a place to go if one actually wanted mushy peas out of a tin to accompany bitter ale. It was also known as objectionable to ladies, and anyone else sensible really, on account of the Oldest Inhabitant who effectively lived there. Though Anna assured them The Old Horse was the place to find out about the Old Horse, and Lachesis viewed the objectionable clientele of the pub as a challenge to be met, they were leaving a place with good food and excellent beer in exchange for a pit.

The crudely painted sign of The Old Horse, depicting an apparent cross of a mangy dog and a cancerous donkey, served as a warning that nothing on the inside was very good.

"Just pretend you don't even see Old Hubba," said Glade. "Assuming he's still alive."

He was, or at least someone left him propped up in the corner when he died, like a waxwork with a domed bald pate and sweeping beard.

"Oh, is he real?" Lachesis said as they passed. She sounded amused by all this.

Finn averted his eyes from Old Hubba and walked straight to the bar, which had no other customers. The red bobbing hair of the server looked oddly familiar, and when the woman turned around her face proved identical to that of Anna at the Green-Eyed Lady.

" _Twins_?" Glade had a note of wonder in his voice.

"Anna sent us," Finn said to the clone.

"That's my name too," she said, and touched her finger to her mouth in the very same gesture used by the other one. Had they not been in different-colored blouses Finn would've suspected a trick.

"Twins," said Glade, sounding all too pleased by this.

“I don't know if this a ploy to drum up business," said Finn, who was becoming more miserable by the second, "but the _other_ Anna sent us here for information on the Old Horse. The one in the hillside.”

“Ah!” Anna Two set down three pints of bitter on the bar. “Well, that’ll be a specialty for You-Know-Who. Oh, _Hubba_!”

“Let’s get out of here,” Finn said, but it was already too late. The repulsive old man in the corner was sputtering. His thick eyebrows twitched and then he wheezed out something that took a moment to untangle as a sentence.

"You want to know about the old one, do you?”

"No," said Glade, even as Finn gave a most reluctant “Yes."

“Ah.” Hubba remained in his chair, at least; he folded his hands over his stomach like a man who’d just had a most satisfying meal. “Back in the turbulent days of His Majesty King Arion III, the forebear of our present Earl had a steward, and an industrious man he was. He took offense to the old white horse that reigned over the valley and covered it over with turf. Then he ordered a new horse, a beast of grace and power, cut into the turf in its stead, and that's the one this town cherishes today. 'Twas the year 1648, one thousand years after St. Nova's victory at the crossroads."

"Okay," said Finn. "So the Old Horse doesn't even exist anymore, and hasn't in three and a half centuries, so why does any of this matter?"

"Ah."

And Hubba went still, as though he’d fallen asleep or perhaps died.

“Well?” Finn prompted, and Hubba answered after a long round of smacking his gums.

"Reverend Wiseman came this way about seven years before the Old Horse met his end. He'll tell you the rest."

-x-

" _Reverend Wiseman_?" Lachesis couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice as she followed them out of the rubbish heap of a pub. “What a story.”

“I’m just glad he wasn’t awake enough to notice you,” Finn said.

“Oh, I’m sure with you two at my side my virtue would be well-defended.” Since Finn didn’t notice the way she’d batted her lashes, Lachesis said in her regular tone of voice, “And where are we headed to now?”

"The library."

"Oh no you don’t. That's the pub down by the school and I've had enough of drinking in disreputable places for one day."

"No. We are going to the actual library.” 

And so she and Glade followed Finn into the town library, where Finn made inquiries at the front desk about any old books on local anything by one Reverend Wiseman. It all took approximately forever as the library was in the middle of transitioning from a card system to a new electronic catalogue, but at last the beleaguered librarian had an answer for them.

"We have an entry for _Further Observations of the White Horse and Other Antiquities_ by one Reverend F. Wiseman, 1641?”

“That sounds right,” said Finn.

“It’s at another branch. It'll be about six days.”

And that was the end of their adventures for the day. Glade went back to the capital, and some industrious town folk cleaned the graffiti off White Horse Hill, and so life returned to its never-ending lull, a tide in perpetual ebb, until the next time someone knocked at the door of The Old Rectory.

Lachesis was reading in that morning’s paper of a seven-year-old girl who disappeared, seemingly snatched from the yard of her family's cottage, and so was glad to have Glade interrupt her with another bag of mail. Again he brought her nothing from Tirnanog.

She made him a cup of tea anyway.

"So how are things?” he asked, still with that gregarious-puppy air about him.

"I'm lonely and bored and I miss my son."

“Right. How's Finn?"

“He’s made a den upstairs where he works on his computer, which as far as I can tell means he's playing war games on his computer, and I suspect goes down to any pub that isn't The Old Horse as soon as I leave the house. I assume that means he's also lonely and bored, and presumably misses his son, and I _also_ assume you've been assigned to this 'beat' in hopes of correcting that."

“Yeah.” Glade was refreshingly open, at least. 

"It's not all bad,” she continued, not wishing to drive any sort of wedge between friends because they had trouble enough as it was. “He spends a lot of time exercising those horses Dorias loaned us and he does keep the kitchen tidy and takes care of the wash, which is good because I've never learned and I'm still trying to understand the microwave. I ruined a very nice plate the day before yesterday.”

She never found out what a man like Glade would fashion as a response, as Finn emerged from his hiding-place of an office just then.

"The book by Wiseman's come into the library," said Finn, who already had his blue jacket on. "Let's find out what he has to tell us."

-x-

It proved the third edition of Wiseman, a reprint from the year 1752, with a leather binding so fragile Finn put on a pair of gloves just to handle it. He’d learned a bit about it in the past six days thanks to the wonders of the electronic web. One of the earliest extant travel narratives of the Manster District, Wiseman’s first volume focused on old churches and relics of Queen Nova and other saints, while this second volume delved into oddities and folklore of this corner of Leonster's countryside. Finn flicked past illustrations of hilltop forts and stone crosses, abandoned castles and fallen megaliths, until the tome fell open to the relevant page.

"Are your people so fond of horses that they call any beast a 'horse'?"

Neither Finn nor Glade had a patriotic defense to her scorn-laced question, for no defense seemed plausible. Only the flowing curve of the creature's neck and back seemed in any way equine. The tail tapered lizard-fashion and terminated in the shape of a crescent moon. The front legs were stubby, the rear close to vestigial. A beaky triangle formed the head, adorned by one great eye, and the ears might've been some horned protuberance.

"It looks like a sag-bellied sausage dog," Lachesis added, and while that wasn't entirely right it wasn't wrong.

"It's hideous," said Glade. "No wonder they buried it."

"It looks like something out of a bestiary," said Finn, who felt a shiver through his body on viewing this misshapen animal. "I've seen stylized horses on old coins but they had an elegance that this... thing... rather lacks."

"Is that supposed to be a saddle on its back?" asked Glade.

"A saddle or a pair of furled wings, and unlovely in either case," replied Finn.

Wiseman's text had little to elucidate this monster which reigned over the hillside three and a half centuries before. He came to this small town in the valley, saw the beast, sketched it, spoke to the locals about it and recorded nothing of consequence, and then departed seeking other novelties.

"Hubba lied. He said Wiseman would have something for us.” Glade sounded truly disappointed.

"Of course Hubba lied. It's what he does," said Finn. 

He carried the old book back to the safety of the librarian so she could make him some copies… and put in another special request for him.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey, it's two of my oft-deployed recurrent bit characters. Yes. Because I can.
> 
> So "Reverend Wiseman" is a tribute to a minor Thracia 776 boss and also to the actual Reverend Francis Wise, whose writings helped inspire this.
> 
> If you compare the dates given here to the official FE4 timeline, somethings may seem... significant.


	3. Blood at the Crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As strange incidents rise despite the alleged security of the Vale of the White Horse, Finn-Lachesis-and-Glade turn from old methods of research to the latest technologies to get to the bottom of things. Chasing phantom horses is easier, after all, than really sorting out the underlying issues.

An eight-year-old boy named Romeo disappeared from his yard whilst playing with a puppy one sunny spring morning, lost in the same manner as the girl named Lucia. His mother sent him out to play while she vacuumed the carpets and by the time she was done, he’d vanished. The puppy wasn't harmed.

These events changed entirely the cocktail of feeling Lachesis experienced for the mothers she watched while sipping burnt coffee in the local bakeshops. What sort of cozy, safe small town was this where well-loved children were snatched away by unseen forces? This, to Lachesis, was the true mystery of the Vale of the White Horse and its surroundings, not whatever manner of enigma might be found in the old books Finn kept requesting from the local library.

Still, Finn’s dogged obsession with an old chalk carving got him out of the house, so Lachesis accompanied him to said library when the next set of books arrived on loan: another musty volume of regional lore and a massive atlas of the Manster District and disputed parts of the Thracian peninsula. Finn took the former and handed her the latter to browse there in the library’s research room.

“It dates to the early years of Arion III, after Wiseman passed through but before the Earl's steward re-cut the hill, so the Old Horse ought to be in it somewhere,” he said.

Lachesis turned this amateur research into a leisure journey through the landscape of a realm still foreign to her, lingering over forest and field and stream while she silently repeated the names of counties and towns to herself. After a time Lachesis came across some of the features Finn had pointed out to her. St. Nova's Crossroads, where a standing stone commemorated one of the legendary queen's victories against the pagan hordes. The ancient fortress of Kelves, where some of the horde made their final stand. The barrows where the heroic dead lay entombed with their treasure.

"Well, that doesn't match at all," said Lachesis on finding the map of the Vale. The Old Horse was there all right, but it was more the skeleton of a horse, scratched out in white lines against the gray backdrop of the hill. "Did the engraving in Wiseman's book somehow get reversed, as in a photograph and a negative?"

"It's possible," said Finn over her shoulder, and then he was off with the atlas in his hands, pestering the librarian for more copies. Why they needed copies of anything, and what precisely Finn was hoping to find, remained a question, but one Lachesis wasn't much pressed to ask.

She hadn't seen him this wrapped up in anything in the better part of a year, and if he was pushing and prodding and making plans in the service of something with no real point to it, it was a better use of time than computer games.

-x-

Finn now had the photocopies of the various extant images of the Old Horse pinned to a board behind the computer in his office. He also had a new point of comparison, a silver coin he'd purchased from a local antiquarian. Minted two centuries after St. Nova's reign, it bore her white horse on its reverse, and the stylized lines of the ancient horse did have some kinship to the outline of the Old Horse as shown in the atlas. That version of the "sag-bellied dog" seemed at once more elegant and more sinister than the beast in Wiseman's engraving, but still it wasn’t quite right. It didn’t quite match.

Finn had the coin in his hand and was pondering its mysteries the next time Glade knocked on the Old Rectory’s door.

"If there's nothing from Tirnanog in the bag I don't want any of it," Lachesis was saying as Finn arrived downstairs, but Glade’s grim expression turned out not to be connected to her rejection of the mail he brought them.

"Some fools daubed the Crossroads Stone with red paint in the night,” Glade said over her head to Finn.

“Are these unconnected acts of vandals or does it all stem from some…” Finn had some hesitation in assembling the words. “Some turn-of-the-millennium anxiety?”

"Almost sounds as though someone has a problem with your Queen Nova,” Lachesis put in. “To hell with her and the white horse she rode in on."

"What, they want to bring back the Sorrows?" Glade’s somber mien only grew more so as he turned upon Lachesis. “There’s nothing funny in that and you can't pretend you don't know about it-- it was going on in your homeland too! Children slaughtered by the dozen and thrown into the bogs, dressed in fine clothes like little princes and princesses..."

“Stop,” said Finn, though it seemed the other two didn’t hear him.

"In my homeland they were hanging witches well into the modern era and I wouldn’t dream of laughing about it,” Lachesis retorted, but the cool tone of her voice had fractured and Finn sensed she was plagued by the same thing he'd just seen flash through his own mind: Diarmuid tossed into a bog as an offering to dark gods, a crimson slash across his tiny throat. “Since there’s nothing for me in your mail bag, you two have fun. I'm going down to the church to help make care packages for the families of the missing children. If you're lucky I might learn enough from the ladies there to be able to cook a meal."

And with that she left them, not without tossing her golden hair for good measure at she went out the door.

"Let's give The Old Horse another try to see if we can get anything more out of Hubba,” Finn suggested once the door latched.

"Sure, if that's what you want,” Glade said, after a long moment where he was overtly processing all that just happened. “I think you're going there to deliberately make a bad day worse.”

They’re all bad days, thought Finn, though he didn’t say it aloud because he was quite certain Glade wouldn’t understand. 

"I always reckoned the owners just went out and paid some passing tramp on the street to paint the sign and got what they got," said Glade of the grotesque horse on the pub sign as they approached. "To think this disaster might've been intentional..."

"I've been thinking over the bestiary angle," said Finn as they ducked into The Old Horse, photocopies tucked into his jacket in case Hubba proved conscious. "If Wiseman is the first reference to the Old Horse, that hardly counts as ancient. It might only have been cut just outside the living memory of his day, and that was a time of building follies all over the Manster District. A chalk-creature out of a bestiary wouldn't have been out of place amid the temples, mazes, lover's bowers, and all the other silly things people built."

"So you're thinking it's some local landlord's folly and not the emblem of some deep evil scarred into the hill?"

"Right."

"Because to look at it in that atlas, it sure feels like some evil scarred into the hills.” Glade hadn’t really dropped the grave expression he’d sported at the Rectory.

"It does,” Finn admitted as he spread the photocopies out across the counter.

"The missing kids are really upsetting her," said Glade once the beer arrived, all the while eying the sleeping mass of Hubba in the corner.

"Not having Diarmuid with us upsets her and the kidnappings make it all worse."

"Yeah," said Glade, for there could be no grounds to disagree. "At least you're doing better."

"Am I?"

"This whole time I haven't seen you randomly, you know, being weird about things."

Glade didn't need to explain the nature of "weird" in this case because Finn remembered entirely too well.

“No,” Finn said, as the thin head on his ale evaporated to a lacing of foam along the glass. "I haven't been doing _that_.”

There wasn’t much else to say afterward, but as Hubba’s snores from the corner rose to an irritating crescendo Finn was moved to try to put some of what was locked into his heart and brain out in the open for Glade’s benefit.

"I pushed a button that opened a floodgate that submerged an enemy base and killed more than three hundred hostiles plus anyone else who happened to be in the area and I received a medal for that. And if I return to duty I'm going back to that. And I'm going to enjoy it, because thinking about that bothers me less than wondering what sort of person pours paint over the Crossroads Stone and wants to bring back the Sorrows. So maybe the best thing right now is we solve the mystery on White Horse Hill."

“Okay then,” said Glade, a slightly stunned expression in his hazel eyes, because what else was there to say?

-x-

When Lachesis got back to The Old Rectory from her afternoon of public service, Glade was gone and she and Finn mended the rupture from earlier in the day. Still, as the days lengthened and spring slid into summer she couldn’t help but notice that the screen of his computer was usually filled with grainy photographs instead of the games he’d been playing to pass the time. When they took advantage of fair weather to ride their horses, it seemed he was forever glancing at the slope of the hill— in bright light, soft light, at the golden hour and at twilight.

"It's not visible," she said one violet evening, for it was turning into a cool and rainy summer, quite typical for Leonster and quite dreary as far as Lachesis was concerned.

"Not to the human eye," Finn admitted.

"Are you saying you can sense it by some other means?"

"We need an inhuman eye."

This arrived in a box from the capital along with Glade and another bag of unwanted letters.

“The finest military surplus,” said Glade as he held aloft a sleek gray case designed to hold something expensive and delicate. "Last year’s model.”

"Is that a camera?" asked Lachesis as Finn cracked the case open.

"A thermographic camera," said Finn as he held it up for viewing; it proved a clunky thing boasting a square screen unlike any camera Lachesis had owned. "If the Old Horse truly does cause discoloration to the grass, then it would have to be made with an actual chalk infill, the same as the White Lady. If it was only made by scraping off turf there wouldn't be a trace of it after so many years. But if there's chalk infill under the turf now, that'll register in a part of the spectrum."

"Infrared," Lachesis said, for she was more than familiar with the military applications of that wavelength. "That's... not a bad idea. But Finn, how much did that camera cost?"

"As much as a fine car, had I purchased it. Thankfully it's on loan,” he said, and behind him Glade beamed at being his enabler.

If one had to be a lonely, bored, and melancholy virtual prisoner laying low in a small town, thought Lachesis, being one with elite military connections and a supply of toys wasn’t the worst thing possible. Not in the least.

"Well, then. The hunt is on," she said, and Finn rewarded her with a strangely giddy smile.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The missing kids' names might sound familiar-- think of an early chapter in FE5. Also yes that's an Oosawa manga reference.


	4. Arrow of Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thermographic camera forces White Horse Hill to give up one secret, but that's only scratching the literal surface of the troubles unfolding in the Vale.

Finn did not immediately turn his thermographic camera upon White Horse Hill because he suspected he'd drive himself mad seeking shadows in the grass with an untrained eye. First he set about learning the camera by practicing around the cottage and the garden, imaging birds and the fence and old cracks in the pavement. Once he felt he knew his way around the hardware Finn spent a few days processing the image files to wring everything he could out of the data.

Only then did he take the camera out for field practice on a known target. Some years before an earlier party seeking ancient glyphs in the area detected a bow and arrow cut into the crest of a hillside. Their photographer had passed away in the meantime, but three photographs survived on a website devoted to ley lines and other anomalies, and Finn decided this glyph would be idea as a test of his camera.

Lacking a car, Finn opted to journey there on horseback.

"Won't that jostle the camera beyond use?" Lachesis asked.

"This case is designed to handle the jolts of an open vehicle traversing the mountains. It'll be fine."

And off he went on his quest, in the aftermath of a light summer rain, his mare clip-clopping along the same roads trod by ancient soldiers. A profusion of roses bloomed along the hedges and in the stillness it seemed to Finn that every sound was amplified threefold, from the buzz of a bee in an unfurled poppy to the hiss of a distant train. Everything seemed in the moment as timeless as Finn’s mode of transportation; even the tower of the cement factory with its thin curl of smoke looked as though it had been in place forever and belonged there in the Vale.

He passed the Crossroads Stone, now scrubbed of its splashing of crimson paint, and continued towards Kelves Hill, crowned by the remains of a fort dating back to the Sorrows where it was said the last remnants of the pagan horde disappeared into a network of tunnels beneath the downs. Just past Kelves he spotted another human—a farmer, Finn thought, turning compost under the soil with a spade. He slowed his horse to a walk and called out to them.

"Hello, stranger.”

This friendly reply came from a tall and spare woman with waves of blond hair pulled back in a jaunty tail. Jaunty, too, described her saffron-hued outfit, a smock-like leather garment that wouldn’t have been out of place at a “medieval times” sort of festival. As to her age, she might've been twenty or she might've been forty; Finn simply couldn't tell.

"I'm here to photograph the glyphs," he said, hoping she didn't take him for a crank… though in the moment he rather resembled one.

She leaned upon her spade and smiled at him like they’d known one another for years.

"When giants walked this land, Brigid the foster-daughter of the mighty Dadgar carried a bow of light itself. But even she fell in a great battle to the west, when the skies brought forth a rain of fire. Her final shot buried itself in the crest of a hill and lit the beacon there to warn all Leonster of the death of the old ways.”

“That’s what I’d like to find... I think,” said Finn, and the camera in his hands felt cold and clumsy.

“Then this is the place. Brigid’s Beacon,” and she pointed to the hill looming over her farm, one nearly as tall as that of Kelves but not quite as ominous.

Capturing a near-vanished glyph was of course a far sight more tricky than photographing a living songbird, and Finn had to toy with the settings for a while, but once he had it right the image in his camera's screen proved unmistakable: the sigil of a bow and arrow, just as he'd seen in the earlier photographs, etched in black upon the curious gray-green of the world. Finn took a dozen pictures in total, just in case some of them failed. He waved a spirited farewell to the lady farmer and returned from Brigid's Beacon buoyant with confidence in his ability to read the camera's output.

Finn and Lachesis made an outing of the photography mission the following day, both of them taking the horses to the base of White Horse Hill. It was a warmer, drier day than any in the previous week, and Finn had little doubt that if the hillside harbored any secrets below the turf, they'd yield to his camera. Fresh off his practice at Brigid's Beacon, it seemed no time at all before the camera gave him access to a world unseen to mortal eyes.

"It's there."

As tall and broad as the true White Horse that faced it down like a battle-rival, this ghost revealed by the trickery of light possessed all the terrible hallmarks of the beast in the old engravings-- the strange point of a head with one tremendous eye, the crescent moon at the tip of its tail, the odd package on its back that might've been wings.

"You've done it," said Lachesis, and Finn thought he heard a thickness to her low voice. Was she blinking back tears? It seemed unlikely.

"Almost," he replied. “Now, to send these files to the sort of people who’ll know what to make of them.”

-x-

Two more children disappeared in the time it took archaeologists from the local college to get back to Finn on excavating the Old Horse.

"There's no pattern to it," Lachesis said as she, Finn, and Glade all collaborated on a grilled summer dinner in The Old Rectory’s expansive back yard. "Three boys and a girl, two from middle-class families, one the son of a cement-factory worker, and now the latest one is a retired general's only son."

"Crimes of opportunity," said Glade as he turned the kebabs on the grill.

"If all it takes to lose one’s child is to send him out to play with a puppy while one vacuums the floor…" 

She sent a hopefully weighted look in Finn’s direction which he pointedly avoided as he worked on the chopped salad. If that’s all it took to lose one’s child, Diarmuid would have to live in a safe house forever... or Lachesis would have to abandon Finn and go join Diarmuid in a place so remote it made the Vale of the White Horse seem a hectic metropolis.

"If the missing children are indeed connected to all these acts of vandalism, those behind it are quite beyond our comprehension,” Finn said as Lachesis continued to stare at him.

“You don’t fancy yourself a criminal profiler, then?” she asked.

“I read books and piece things together,” he replied. “And kill people, now and again. That doesn’t make me a match for some manner of cult.”

“Hey, dinner’s looking good,” Glade said more loudly than was truly necessary and they all agreed to let it drop while they enjoyed the kebabs and salad and the fruit trifle that Lachesis contributed to the table. For someone trained to manage a kitchen but not truly use one, her skills were coming along nicely.

In the morning, Finn had a message in his inbox from the college informing him that the Department of Archaeology intended to follow the lead on the beast engraved in the hillside as soon at the first opportunity, and this turned their languid summer days into a comparative flurry of activity.

“How long will it take to uncover it?” asked Lachesis on the day the digging was to commence.

"There's a chalk horse the next county over not much smaller than White Lady that was cut in the space of a night,” said Finn. “Though I expect an actual scientific dig won’t proceed at that pace.”

Word of Finn’s photographs and the planned excavation had spread from the college through the rest of the Vale, and it made the dig something of a festival instead of a purely forensic scene, with entire families out on the hiking trail to see the work. No one was rolling wheels of cheese or dancing around beribboned poles, but gifts of sweet buns and lemonade were offered up the workers and Lachesis had no compunction about accepting some for herself and for Finn.

"It's taking everyone's minds off the missing children for an afternoon,” she said as a helicopter from the evening news hovered overhead. 

Finn for his part kept glancing up at the helicopter as though he expected it to send bullets in their direction, and to get that idea out of her mind Lachesis got as close as she could to the archaeology crew to watch them work. She knew it was there and still Lachesis gasped when the turf peeled back like the rind of an orange to show a dark line through the pale chalk.

"It's like a trench outlined in stone,” she heard one of the crew call to the other researchers, and the helicopter drew in closer to take its aerial photographs, and the earth-based news crews pressed against the caution tape set up by the researchers.

"We can't be seen on television,” Finn whispered to her as the cameras went off around them. “Have Glade talk to them."

And so Glade faced the news crews with his winsome everyman demeanor, explaining how he'd taken a liking to the Vale on visits here with his "mates" as a schoolboy, and how a chance remark dropped in a pub set him on the trail of finding the long-concealed figure. With help from those mates, of course.

-x-

The strange joy of the day’s discovery transformed at dusk to a different, less pleasant, sensation as Finn and Lachesis dressed to attend a vigil for the missing children at the cathedral. Finn had gone there more than a few times over their months in town, lighting candles for various causes that might not be entirely lost, but Lachesis avoided setting foot in the cavern of green and white marble unless societal duty compelled her as it did that night.

They took a pew off to the side; Lachesis looked like she belonged in one of the stained-glass windows with her gilded hair falling over her shoulders and a candle in her small hands. Finn kept glancing around the cathedral, at the stone that was transported block by sacred block from the old town out on the chalk plain. No matter where he looked, he could see the fire of a hundred candles reflected in the polished metal and glass and in each facet of the ancient windows.

He could see the fire when he closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to Lachesis and he slipped out of the pew, past the sleeping statues of the blessed dead and out the side door to the graveyard. 

The late-summer balm carried the distant taint of the cement factory but not the scent or heat of blossoming flames. Finn stood with his eyes closed, breathing deeply until the fireball faded from his mind. When he opened his eyes, Finn realized he stood on the grave of an Army Lieutenant who’d died in 1798, and the date of the man's death was Finn's own birthday. Finn felt something catch between his shoulders.

"Hey, we're not going there again.”

The arm around his shoulders belonged to Glade, who held him as though that alone could stop the spasm of nervous laughter. It hadn’t worked in the past, but it seemed to tonight, almost.

"I'm fine,” Finn said as he tried to collect himself.

“You sure?” asked Glade.

“Not really.”

A flicker of light at the edge of his vision made Finn glance back toward the church. Lachesis stood in the darkness of the doorway, the candle in her hand, golden cross blazing in the hollow of her throat, twin flames beaming back at him in her dark eyes… and then he knew things weren’t going to be all right.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone familiar with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, enjoy the the reference to "Cathedral" in the final scene. :)


	5. Little Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lachesis stumbles into an entirely new dimension to the mysteries plaguing the Vale of the White Horse. These things can't all be connected by a through-line... can they?

"I would offer you a beer but I'm afraid I don't keep them around," Lachesis said to Glade once they'd brought Finn home from the cathedral and put him down for the night. "I prefer wine, and your country doesn't do a very good job of that."

"Whiskey's good," he said, only a little muted from his usual high spirits. 

As Lachesis retrieved the whiskey from an upper cupboard in the kitchen she wondered what it would be like living with someone set at Glade's wavelength: disciplined, yes, often unflappably so, but without coming from the baseline of melancholy where Finn often existed. 

"It's not that I don't have any feeling for what you both experienced in the hot zone," Lachesis said as she handed him a glass of whiskey and a chaser of water. "Or care that he came back from it with a paralyzing case of survivor's guilt and a remarkable lack of interest in the intimate side of our marriage, and this problem with fire on top of it all.”

She didn’t expect a response from Glade, beyond that he'd toss back some of the whiskey, and she wasn't disappointed.

"I don't understand what he went through. You, on the other hand, will never understand what I went through, giving birth under an assumed name in a foreign country's military hospital, estranged from any living members of my family while my husband was on an twelve-month deployment in which I heard from him twice. I held our newborn child and thought of how back in my home, Diarmuid’s very existence would be greeted with a twenty-one gun cannonade instead of a plastic bracelet that said 'Baby Boy N' on it."

Just speaking aloud of it sent her back into memories that must surely be as vivid as the flashbacks that billowing flames inflicted on Finn. Diarmuid as a tightly-wrapped bundle in her arms, his pale-blue eyes showing confusion on being thrust into a world of harsh light and sound. She’d undone his swaddling to get a look at his tiny fingers as the Silessian nurse urged her to try feeding him, and then the sound of a waterfall interrupted their bonding.

“Then things got unpleasant and in any country other than Silesse I probably would’ve died, or been permanently maimed. But I was lucky, the same way Finn was lucky, and we survived our front lines to get exiled here. As for Diarmuid, he's being raised not far from where international community keeps a vault of seeds to feed the earth in the event of a nuclear holocaust, while my horizon is now limited by green hills with chalk-creatures scrawled upon them and the specter of children being stolen in broad daylight." 

And Glade nodded, because he clearly had the sense to know when words were not welcome.

“My family is gone, my friends are gone, and all I really have left to me are Finn and our son. And should I be compelled to choose between them, my choice is already made.”

At this Glade poured Lachesis out her own serving of whiskey, and she drank the peat-tasting burning stuff along with him while Finn slept off his troubles, and it was almost as though they were now good friends.

-x-

The archaeologists went about their work with more care than Finn had seen given to crime scenes. He stood on the crest of White Horse Hill, a summer’s gale tearing at his hair and his jacket, as the researchers moved about inside a grid of orange tape and warning flags. Most of the Old Horse lay exposed now, but today the archaeologists were trying something new with samples of chalk from the very bottom of the trenches that made the creature’s outline, and it required using a part of the hindquarters not yet brought to light.

It wasn’t especially compelling to view, for all Finn felt a stake in it, and his attentions kept wandering to the valley floor, where the alignment of monuments and sacred sites formed its own network. Was it happenstance the way the ruins of the old town lay aligned with the new, or the tidy line of sight from Brigid’s Beacon to Kelves? And yet the tower of the cement factory fit neatly into the pattern, as did the vacant space where an orphanage existed long before Finn and Glade ever set foot in the Vale of the White Horse. There could not be deep meaning in all of this, surely…

And yet, the ability to look at a data set and glean a meaningful pattern where others saw but a mess just happened to be why Finn had so often been useful, and valued. 

_Everybody can reason from A to B. Far too many people then can't get from B to C, and not many at all can get past C._

_I can get past C. That’s why they’ve bothered to keep me around._

But if the journey from a handful of rumors to the Old Horse was the jump from A to B, and the missing children were C…

No, there had to be a step in between. Or perhaps all of this truly was madness.

-x-

On an otherwise quiet weekday morn, the town was set a-boil by the story that a pair of children, a brother and sister out to play in a field at the outskirts of the town, found small human remains in a shallow grave. Lachesis waited out the day in the cafe in hopes of news, but the local police promptly dispelled the excitement. The remains were old, they said. Not relevant, they said. Not anything to do with the kidnappings.

“So from what I heard in the cafe, it’s not the first time someone’s stumbled across little bones here,” she reported that night as she made quite a credible pasta dish with black olives and salmon for their dinner.

“Well, after several thousand years of human settlement that’s not surprising,” said Glade. He was taking dinner with them, for in the aftermath of the incident at the candlelight vigil he rarely wasn’t in their company.

But it struck a chord with Finn, who’d been staring into a glass of red wine as though it had something to tell him.

“In our second summer here, Glade…. those two boys who lived at the housing estate at the edge of town… Thom and Mat,” he began, in that tentative understated way that often meant something far too important was about to be said. “They were playing with a skull they found down where the old mother-and-baby home used to be. They thought it was a plastic toy and carried it all around for a few days.”

“That’s right! They brought it into the Green-Eyed Lady and we used the distraction of the barkeep to get her to serve us.”

“And all the adults claimed it must’ve come from the angels’ plot at the home, but you and I both knew that didn’t make any sense,” Finn continued.

“Right, because that skull was too large for an infant and it still had some teeth,” Glade finished.

“What are you saying?” asked Lachesis, for the images this painted in her head were almost too much for her to handle at present, and she was furiously stirring the pasta sauce so as not to dwell on tiny skulls.

“I’m suggesting that while the archaeologists deal with the secrets of the Old Horse, there might be a field we want to investigate,” said Finn, and neither Glade nor Lachesis could talk him out of it.

The next day, Lachesis and Finn walked the town path all down its length in the quiet hour when the laborers and shopkeepers and children were all in their appointed places and people of leisure had not yet settled in for a coffee lunch. As they walked Finn filled Lachesis in on the latest arcane thing the researchers were doing with the Old Horse that now lay three-quarters exposed on the hillside.

"So they’ve retrieved some silt from to the bottom layer in the trench to date it by how long it's been since it's seen daylight,” he said of one particular test for which the local researchers had called in outside assistance. “I was worried about pranks and vandals but the team assured me it’s been quiet up there. I did expect we'd draw more of a crowd…”

"No one cares about your silt-testing experiments as long as seven children are missing," she told him, and as she was slightly out of breath it came off a little harsher than she’d planned.

Finn halted in his tracks and turned to face her, his eyes wide and blue as a child’s against the summer haze.

"Lachesis, I know getting to the bottom of this isn't going to save anyone, but--"

"It's saving you, I can see that,” she said, now deliberately gentle. “And maybe me, a bit. It's beautiful to see you being passionate about something. It’s not like either of us asked—“

And the words caught in her throat as her foot caught in soft chalk, whereupon the ground swallowed her. Lachesis heard crunching beneath the soles of her boots as she blinked the dust out of her eyes. 

“ _Lachesis_?”

“I’m not hurt,” she said, and in truth she wasn’t unhappy to hear the outright fear, the _need_ , even, in Finn’s voice. But she wasn’t hurt, though she’d dropped about three feet down into this sinkhole, as all her reflexes proved in remarkable shape. Her eyes now free of chalk dust, Lachesis looked down to see what was crunching beneath her.

Bones. Delicate little bones. Straight pieces, curving ones, fragments. As Lachesis looked around her she realized this was no natural sinkhole but a chamber built by human hands, like the catacombs of Agusty, with walls of pale brick and mortar, and actual stair-steps visible in the slanted pile of rubble beneath her. The tunnel at its base stretched on, in the direction of the main road, and Lachesis peered into its gloom with the taste of chalk thick on her suddenly dry tongue. 

-x-

Lachesis was ensconced in their best chair, wrapped in her favorite fleece blanket, fortified by whiskey and tea by the time Glade arrived to hear her tale.

“Directly under me were bones all in a jumble,” she said, now providing quite the analytical witness in spite of her shock. “Ribs, mostly. A shoulder blade, an arm bone, and I think the crown of a skull. I got the impression they came from more than one child, and none of them could be older than three.”

“You mean older than three in terms of the age of the child?” asked Glade, who was writing it all down as they went.

“Yes, of course. The bones themselves were quite old. It smelled down there of dust and mold and dampness,” she said, and wrinkled her nose in a way that Finn thought was very Lachesis.

“How far down did you say they were?” Glade asked then.

“When I stood up in the hole my shoulders were above the ground, so…. three and a half feet at most?”

Finn nodded his agreement on this point, and so Glade looked his way for the next question.

“That deep enough for ancient times?”

“No. Remains dating back to the Sorrows here in the valley are an average of five to six feet down.” After all the reading he’d done, Finn could say that with certitude.

“But they’d bulldozed the site after the Home came down, so maybe that would scrape up a few feet of topsoil?” Glade sounded like he knew he was fishing, and Finn only shook his head at that one.

“You said it was a home for _unwed mothers_?” Lachesis asked, casting the final two words out with asperity.

“Yeah, but it was kind of a cross between that and an orphanage,” Glade supplied. “There were pretty strict laws about having kids outside of marriage until about fifteen years ago, so if someone had a kid in one of those homes they had to leave them there to get adopted out.” 

“They existed all through the Manster District, in a cooperative agreement between the Church and the Crown,” Finn added. “Twelve years ago a fire at a home in Connaught killed thirty-six children and after that the entire network shut down.”

“You remember that terribly well, given you’d have been a child yourself,” said Lachesis, with an arch to her brows like she didn’t entirely believe him.

“As someone whose parents were dead, and who lived in the care of the Crown, it didn’t escape me there were far worse places I might’ve ended up.”

That was really all there was to it, and Glade added, “Yeah, I can vouch that if there was a story in the papers about bad things in the orphanages, Finn couldn’t put it down.”

“I don’t believe I’d ever touched a newspaper at that age,” said Lachesis, and though sometimes she overdid the role of being the sheltered princess, Finn suspected that was probably true. “Anyway, I think the part about it being an orphanage can tell us exactly what was down in the tunnel.” 

“Go on,” said Glade, sounding like he knew he wasn’t going to like it. Finn, who already _had_ an idea that he truly didn’t like about the tunnel, held silence as Lachesis recounted the rest of her experience in the hole.

“Lining the walls were these little… parcels… all wrapped up. I had the impression of loaves of bread, stacked three high on shelves at a bakery.” There seemed a brittleness to her now, despite the softness of her pose in the chair; Lachesis was showing too many teeth and her eyes seemed too bright. “When Diarmuid was born, the nurse first gave him to me all wrapped up in a little package. I thought he would suffocate so I demanded they set him free. A newborn child all swaddled up would look a great deal like a parcel about the size of a loaf of bread, wouldn’t you say?” 

Glade said a word then that normally would’ve been unacceptable in the presence of a noble lady, but upon reflection it was probably the only appropriate response, and _somebody_ needed to say it.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If what Lachesis encountered seems improbable, I recommend reading up on the Lost Children of Tuam. But only if you've a strong stomach for atrocity.
> 
> Finn's musings on A-B-C are inspired by some things Josephine Tey wrote in her mysteries about the difference between criminals and people who don't go that way. Many of her ideas are laughably out of date but she does have some insights worth keeping in mind.


	6. An Appeal to Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our three detectives dig into the latest and most disturbing yet of The Vale's many mysteries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I last updated I visited the UK, went to one of the historical inspirations for the White Horse (the one in Westbury) and hit an actual ancient pub called The White Horse. Also Finn and some other Thracia characters came to FE Heroes. Yay.

“I don’t want to talk to your police.” Lachesis said it from her chair feeling as adamant as a queen of old on her throne, the fortified cup of tea held so tightly she was almost surprised the handle didn’t snap. “I am supposed to be keeping a low profile. _Hiding._ Keeping myself safe. Besides, one shouldn’t distract the police from trying to find the missing children. Whatever’s down there has been dead for a while.”

Glade looked like he found that line of argument sensible, or at least sensible enough. He’d taken to chewing on the end of his pen, possibly to keep more rude things from coming out of his mouth.

“But Lachesis, those _are_ missing children. Shouldn’t they have justice?” That, of course, came from Finn.

“What does justice avail the dead?” she replied.

“Are we sure they're _missing_ children?” Glade asked around the end of his pen. "Or... un-accounted for children? Maybe the orphanage really did have its own cemetery like convents and old hospitals do, and that transparent excuse of an angels' plot wasn't entirely wrong." 

"I've spent a great deal of the last few months looking at maps of the Vale and there's nothing of the sort on any extant map,” said Finn. “I have my own misgivings about speaking to the police..."

"Because you are _also_ in hiding," Lachesis put in.

"Because it seems to me the police already know and aren't much interested in the investigation."

"Or that," said Lachesis, and flicked her hair in a version of the trueborn Agustrian's world-weary shrug at endemic corruption.

"How do you reckon that one out?" asked Glade, his eyes narrowed in a warning at his friend’s sudden uncharacteristic cynicism.

"Two boys run around town with the skull of a small child. Nothing to see here. Two children find bones of yet more children. Nothing to see here. I'll wager every square foot of the hillside that makes up the Old Horse is being excavated with more care than anyone's given to either what Thom and Mat found seven years ago or what those siblings uncovered this week. The authorities _have_ to know, and it's not a priority."

"Honestly given that 'angels' plot' nonsense it seems a good part of the town knew," said Lachesis.

"Yes. We're visitors walking into a place with its own rules, never written and rarely spoken. And really, when we think it over... why wasn't that land used when they built the housing estate? A large parcel of land right next to the main road out of town? That's not the sort of land that's just left vacant... unless there's another unspoken agreement not to go digging there." Finn frowned, and his eyes seemed glassy and unfocused for a moment. "These people kept the memory of a vanished chalk carving alive for that many centuries and yet didn't know about a tunnel filled with human remains?”

“Well then,” said Glade. “If you don't trust the police to have look at that tunnel, what do you say to a little unauthorized military exercise?”

Glade then flashed his credentials, and Lachesis couldn’t resist a smile.

-x-

Finn found himself arguing with Lachesis about who was going into the hole their entire trip across town. Glade might have stepped in and said he’d be the one but instead he let them talk it out.

“Finn, it's not a large space. I'm a much better fit,” Lachesis said yet again.

“ _No_. You don’t have be walking around atop all those little bones any more than I need to walk towards a house fire. I’ll do it.”

And this, the admission that each of them had their vulnerable points that ought not to be prodded, resolved the issue in a way that mere logic could not. Lachesis smiled up at him, and when he moved to put an arm around her shoulder she leaned into it and slipped her own arm around his waist. That felt warm and reassuring in a way that it hadn’t in… a while.

“Is this the hole you two found?” Glade asked, for after all there might be more than one sinkhole in that vacant space.

“Yes,” said Finn, for he recognized the shape and the cluster of ragged flowers at its lip— one white aster surrounded by three blue ones.

Knowing that nothing in that pit could be good, Finn zipped up his jacket and braced himself for entering it the way he would for any mission, drawing in deep breaths and clearing his mind of everything until he got into the headspace that allowed him to witness terrible things without feeling anything. Almost anything. Lachesis helped him adjust the improvised dust mask they’d made out of one of her scarves and he went in.

It was as Lachesis described, small bones and a great quantity of pale dust. The low ceiling was not entirely true, as upon clearing a few rubble-choked steps the ceiling proved fully seven feet up, making it possible for Finn to walk upright. His flashlight arced across brickwork forming niches into the wall, three tiers of them, just as Lachesis described. On them were the strange and terrible objects, stacked quite like loaves of bread in some abandoned bakery, their plain white shrouds turned to gray or sticky black by time and damp. Some of them were so old as to have come apart, the wrappings fallen away to leave no doubt as the contents.

Finn snapped pictures of these before continuing down the passage, where a smooth expanse of wall bore a message scribbled in bone-black or charcoal.

“DARK LORD COME SAVE US”

He’d seen the name of the ancient Dark Lord taken lightly many a time, on punk jackets and on album covers and other places where it was meant to be seen and to shock. Below it was more graffiti— an ugly stick figure with a triangular head, arched back, and long tail with a jagged row of spikes added for good measure. Beyond that the chamber narrowed to a short flight of steps leading down to another room. Finn’s flashlight picked out more shrouded figures stacked along the walls, most of them too long to be newborns. He didn’t trust the air in there and as they hadn’t brought along a monitor Finn retraced his steps and raised himself up through the hole.

“Did you really need to poke around for that long?” asked Lachesis, as she and Glade both seemed shocked by the extent of his explorations.

“I have enough,” he replied, and held up the camera. 

They didn’t like Finn’s account of what he found in the hole any more than they’d liked how long he’d been gone.

"Are you saying the mother-and-baby home was run by a dragon cult?” asked Glade. “I mean, you know, the Old Ways.”

"Of course not. The graffiti is in a child's hand.”

“But were they then _reared_ in a dragon cult?” asked Lachesis.

“I can’t make that assumption based on one prayer and a drawing,” said Finn. “I’ll tell you though, people raised there must still be alive. Some of them surely live in town. Let’s see what the local papers had to say about the Home’s closure… and anything else deemed of note.”

It didn’t surprise him, really, that the idea of some ancient cult’s revival caught their imagination more than the idea of an unmarked mass grave under a field.

“I’ll take these to develop,” Glade said of the film. “You don’t want the local chemist looking at… whatever it is we’ve got here.”

-x-

And so it was back to the library once Glade hopped on the train to the capital yet again with the camera in his keeping. Lachesis took on the task of sifting through articles in the microfiche machine while Finn went deeper into archives seeking permits, blueprints, surveyor’s notes, and anything else in the public record.

_"There was no real effort to teach them, they made up their own language."_

_"You never got to make friends, as they'd just disappear."_

_"That's my son. You have my son in there. I want him back."_

_"Unnatural. That's what it was. Unnatural."_

_"The light wasn't there. The saints weren't there. Only the darkness.”_

Lachesis read the faded and distorted articles until her eyes blurred from the strain of the machine and the horrible things she'd been reading. Long-dead voices chattered in her head as she went to confront Finn, who'd borrowed an overhead projector from that patient librarian and was comparing layers of things on top of it. Lachesis had so much outrage bottled inside her that even she was surprised by the first thing to surface and leave her mouth.

“There’s a man in town whose younger sister was sent to the home forty years ago, when she was seventeen. She died in there and even though the family gave the Church money for her burial, he's never been able to find her grave. We have to help him.”

Finn to his credit no longer looked surprised by any of this.

"The Home was a hundred and fifty years old when the structure came down,” he said back to her. “It'd been a workhouse, a hospital, and then briefly a prison before being taken over by the Church seventy years ago. That tunnel you discovered maps exactly to where the old wastewater system ought to be."

"Was the town trying to wash away its sins?"

Finn could only shake his head. Lachesis grasped his hand before he could reach for another stack of documents to set on that blasted projector.

"When this is over, and we've found the children-- _all_ of them-- we are getting Diarmuid back, and we are never leaving him alone again."

"Yes," said Finn, so gravely that she knew that he knew he was giving her permission to tear down Heaven itself to find their child if that's what it took. "We are."

-x-

“Where’s your friend?”

Anna Two at The Old Horse ribbed him now whenever he showed up without Glade. It would have made for a good excuse to avoid the place except that other pub hosts and barkeeps were doing it too.

Finn wasn’t ignorant of the penalties for showing up somewhere isolated and trampling over its unwritten rules. The entire Vale of the White Horse had figured out that he was ex-military and had Problems and that the two things were connected, and they were mostly kind to him. He’d met a couple of students at the pub down by the library who told him off for his career choices and said he’d deserved the Problems but mostly he was written off as harmless— can’t work, drinks a bit, pesters people about arcane topics, sometimes shows up on a horse.

Lachesis with her too-obvious foreign glamor was less acceptable to the Vale until she’d started doing her volunteer work with women from the church. Some thought her a spy, though to what end no one could say. The Vale’s imagination didn’t run to the idea of an actual princess of a faraway land hiding among them and so went to conclusions fueled by more pulpy films and airport novels. As for Glade, the prevailing view was that inhabitants of The Old Rectory had a love-nest situation going on, though a minority of gossips who didn’t remember Glade from his cadet days believed him to also be a foreign spy because he looked and acted the part of the local lad entirely too well.

Hiding in the Vale only worked because there was some measure of truth in their cover and because no one had taken enough of a dislike to them to pick their situation apart as the people of the Vale were fundamentally incurious. They’d make things up about how Lachesis had taken Glade as a lover because “the wars” (for they were delightfully unclear on which wars) had left Finn in some way non-functional, but they did not and would not do any actual research. They could not get from A to B to C, in part because they didn’t want to. It was the same lack of curiosity that allowed them to ignore that vacant field and its tiny bones, and Finn sensed that prodding into the secrets of that field was going to up-end whatever stability he and Lachesis had here. It might well make Earl Dorias upset with them both.

“The usual?” Anna Two was saying to him in the tone of someone who’d repeated herself several times over, and Finn realized his thoughts had wandered far afield when he reacted to way Anna Two said “friend” when speaking of Glade.

“Yes… sorry.”

The Annas, whether they were natural twins or the result of some secret cloning project also sent to the Vale to hide, did not have the incuriosity native to the Vale. They were in a sense free agents, or wild cards, or something of that nature. They were not in fact stolid protectors of the Vale and its ways, as some pub proprietors were.

Anna Two might not actually care if the peace of the Vale got blown sky-high in a metaphorical sense.

“Anything else with the pint today?”

“I’m looking for a man called Salem,” Finn replied. 

Lachesis wanted them to track down the man whose sister disappeared into the Home four decades prior, but Finn had pieced together another lead he wanted to follow. He was not at all surprised to find that one of the final orphans “cared for” by the local institution frequented The Old Horse. Of course he did.

“Right over there.”

Anna Two pointed out a young man with a red knot of hair, someone who looked more of a punk musician than the ageless, timeless sort of character that made up the usual clientele, like the static figure of Old Hubba by the fireplace.

“I was an orphan in care of the Crown,” Finn said to introduce himself to Salem, perfectly true even if he’d never known the privations of those in the Home. “I’m looking into the circumstances of the mother-and-baby home in town.”

The other man nodded, almost like this was something he’d been waiting for.

“I was born there, lived there until I was six,” said Salem, in the quiet voice of someone resigned to not being heard. “Then I was adopted out, less than a year before the Home closed down.”

Finn didn’t take notes, not even to scratch on a napkin when Salem weren’t paying him mind. He just listened. If he’d ever imagined that nothing might ever truly shock him again, he was soon disabused of that notion.

-x-

Lachesis was assembling more care packages for the families of the missing children (still at seven, though Lachesis now wondered if the less respectable families just weren't being counted) when one of her church “friends” mentioned they were closing in on some late-summer holiday, a celebration of another moldy saint marked by fortune-telling and a grand bonfire.

“I’m glad you’re going out. There’s no need to stay in on my account,” Finn said as Lachesis dressed in her idea of village festival clothing. She’d put aside the modest aquamarine drops she wore in her ears most days and had decked herself in a demi-parure of rainbow tourmaline, a piece of Nordion’s royal jewels that might plausibly pass for the finery of an ordinary woman on a more modest budget. 

He sounded so at peace with the idea of her taking her tourmalines out and having a merry dance around the bonfire that Lachesis lost any interest in doing so. They didn’t need to learn to have a good time apart, and of late they’d been much better at enjoying one another’s company.

“We could go up White Horse Hill,” she suggested then. “Sit in her eye like we used to. The bonfire would be a pinpoint and the rockets won’t be right overhead.”

“It’s still a dig site,” Finn replied, though she could tell from the way his face softened for a moment that he’d at least been tempted. “I was going to go to the cathedral and hope those old walls are sturdy enough to block out the sound.”

And so Lachesis and her glittering strands of tourmaline went to go brighten up the old cathedral. She hated the place now, and by the time they got there she had a whirl of fierce thoughts in her head.

 _These poor mothers, a lot of them teenagers like me, alone like me, passing through hell to give birth to the babies they’d conceived on the wrong side of the blankets like me, leaving their children behind for_ their own good like me…

"They're so desperate to find the kids they've brought in a psychic,” Lachesis said into the stillness of marble and pride. 

“The church?” Finn asked as he stared up at the vault of its ceiling. “Or the police?”

“The police.”

They walked in a slow procession through the the oldest parts of the church, the parts where each individual block of stone around them was supposedly carted from the original town out on the chalk plain.

“You said the Church made sure to move every last tomb when the old town got abandoned?”

“So the story goes,” said Finn.

“And yet a few hundred children get left behind in a bricked-up sewer on property the Church used to own. I wonder why.”

"You know why," he said. 

He’d come back from the hot zone with his voice gone lower and rougher than it had been on their wedding day, and Lachesis often wondered if he’d burned it out by screaming. The darkness came through in it now, but that was well-suited to the subject matter.

“Hold me,” Lachesis said, and he did, and they stood there between two ancient columns as a few rockets outside lit up the windows. The reports of the rockets were muffled by the old walls but they weren’t silenced.

The King of Nordion could make his young daughter by his mistress into an acknowledged princess and hold the rest of the world to it, at least until he died and the world order fell apart. Some girl forty years dead from this little town in Leonster had no such grace looking out for her, or her child, or any of them. Small wonder some might’ve turned to the Old Ways for comfort, beneath the disapproving gaze of the great cathedral.

“I want you to make love to me on the grave of that soldier that had you so transfixed the last time we were here,” she said. “The one with your birthday.”

“Death day. He died on the date I was born. I’d rather we not be arrested,” he said, but he didn’t grow tense or pull away or draw in a sharp panicked breath.

“The whole town’s dancing like mad things around a fire as the children rot. They’re in thrall to the Dark Lord and they don’t even know it.”

“I don’t think I understand anymore what the Dark Lord even is, or was, to anyone,” said Finn.

It wasn’t a desecration, Lachesis thought with the cold marble at her back and her hair across the grass. Everything around them was already desecrated. This act was holy by comparison.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the idea of the mother-and-baby home is drawn from real-life sources. No, I did not exaggerate anything save the mention of the Dark Lord. If anything I downplayed what went on in some of those places.


	7. Fire on the Mountain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some mysteries are resolved and some, it seems, are destined to remain eternal.

“You have one hell of a War Room going on up here now.”

Glade said this of Finn’s computer room, which did feature an impressive array of peg boards, photo albums, index cards, and reference binders. Amid the photocopied maps and library books Finn kept small trinkets, like the White Horse Coin and a figurine of St. Nova, to keep his inspiration going.

“It has been something of an endeavor, hasn’t it?” he replied.

“It’s about to become some real trouble. I’ve got duplicates of everything,” Glade said of the prints and negatives of Finn’s photos that he’d brought along with the usual sack of mail. He was no longer smiling as easily and often, for reasons that seemed quite obvious to Finn. “I think we’ve got enough there to send people to jail.”

“Yes. Possibly ourselves,” said Finn.

“Huh?” And Glade gave him the quizzical look that said that Finn had gone straight past anyone’s comprehension. “For trespassing? Not our fault Lachesis fell in when you were out on a stroll.”

For that was their alibi, with just the right measure of the truth.

“Locked up somewhere for our own good, I mean. It wouldn’t take much to convince a magistrate I’m better off in some place more secure than this after that scene I caused at the candlelight vigil. Just a few words in the right ears…” Finn picked up the enameled figurine of St. Nova and touched the tip of one finger on her holy lance. “And that’s at the bottom of it all, isn’t it? What we allow to be done to people for their own good? I didn’t see it clearly at first, but Lachesis made me see.”

“Ah, don’t sell yourself short,” Glade replied. “I’d wager you could steal my service revolver and fire indiscriminately around the village green and His Majesty would find a way to smooth it over. Not that I’m saying you should…”

“Depending on how much resistance these photos bring about in town, purging the village green might be warranted. Not that I even know the way to go about exposing it,” Finn admitted. “It’s one thing to convince Earl Dorias to let archaeologists dig up his hillside…”

“Oh, that was easy— he’s thrilled. The oldest White Horse in all the realm on his land? He can’t stop talking about what it means for his ancestral pride.” Glade scratched at the back of his head as he was wont to do when anxious and added, “I guess I’m glad for something you mentioned just now, as we do kind of have to talk about your future.”

“Has there been a turn in things abroad?” Finn wasn’t sure if what he was feeling was even hope, as right now the hope of resolving anything beyond the scope of his own War Room seemed so improbable.

“No. Not that I’ve heard anyway,” Glade corrected himself, for it wasn’t as though his security clearance went to the top. “Dorias assumes that after a couple of months in the country, in pleasant surroundings, laying low and pursuing diversions in the company of your pretty wife…”

“Yes?”

“He thinks that surely you’re over all the… weirdness,” Glade said, again deploying his euphemism for something that carried more technical names. “That as soon as the international unpleasantness involving you and Lachesis both passes over, you’ll come right back on active duty, you know. As you were.”

“I’m not over it. You know I’m not over it,” Finn said, as he quite deliberately drove the dull pewter point of St. Nova’s lance under one fingernail so he could concentrate on the pain of that and not the specters Glade summoned in spite of his vague words.

“Yeah. I didn’t want to believe it myself when I first got here, but I like to think I’m the kind of guy who can deal with facts.” Glade ran his own fingers along the edge of a stack of tunnel photographs to emphasize _facts_. “But Dorias… you’ve heard him. He thinks the training Special Forces go through make us superhuman or something. He just flat-out thinks you can’t be as bad off as his own staff doctors say you are because we’re all supposed to be… better than that. I guess.”

“Glade, you don’t know the half of what’s gone through my head…” Finn wasn’t even surprised or offended by how Earl Dorias thought, as somehow he’d never expected otherwise. “As far back as I can remember, everything in my life was almost intolerable. Then I met you, and we went through training together and did everything that we did under General Quan, and received everything that came out of that… and it was like a blessing. For the first time my life had a meaning and a purpose and I was good at something. And realizing that I can’t hit ‘reset’ and return to that has done something inside of me, but…”

He really couldn’t say any more on it. Besides, there was a little show of blood now under his nail. Finn set St. Nova back where she belonged on his table. Glade cast a suspicious glance at the saint and her tiny lance before turning towards Finn with an especially stern expression that masked the warmth in his eyes.

“I’m actually glad to hear you say you don’t want to go back on duty because I was going to have to tell you it was _my_ hard duty to stand in your way if you did want it, the way things are right now.”

“And that’s why you’re going to be the General of all the Army one day,” Finn said, and for a moment he felt perfectly calm inside in a good way, like the still glow of light on a glassy lake.

“Yeah, sure. Besides that, looking at all this…” Glade swept his arm in the direction of all the maps, photographs, research books, and such. “I’d say there’s something you’re pretty damn good at besides eliminating hostiles. There’s got to be a living in it somewhere, right?”

-x-

A letter from Tirnanog arrived in Glade’s bag. Lachesis almost floated around the kitchen as she assembled another attempt at Leonster’s most beloved dessert, as photographs of Diarmuid now adorned the mantle of The Old Rectory and his colorful scribbles now papered the walls and many a flat surface. With actual evidence of her son on display, Lachesis at last felt that she was presiding over a home and not some manner of rabbit hole. Some of that new joy went into the trifle, and when she unveiled the three tiers of ladyfingers and custard girding late-summer fruit, she took the reaction of Finn and Glade as evidence she’d mastered it.

Of course she had. Even the ringing of the phone just after she served up the trifle didn’t dim her mood, as she began to regale Glade with some anecdotes of her royal childhood as Finn took the call.

“Ladyfingers in Agustria are more dry and less sweet than you have here, and for years I’d only eat pink ladyfingers made in Madino.”

“Were they special?” asked Glade. “I mean, did they taste different to ones that weren’t pink?”

“They were pink,” she replied, with a smile at her past self. “And only one bakery with the royal warrant could make them.”

From the other room she could hear Finn asking "That long?” to the other party on the line. This phone call became involved enough that Glade had time to relay in turn the story of how he and Finn had been on a school trip to a museum when someone called in a bomb threat. The boys, not yet the fine soldiers they were destined to become, had not understood the gravity of the situation in the least and cared only that they’d be late for the bus.

“So we dash down the stairs and ignore the people shouting after us, burst outside via the main doors and look for the rest of our classmates, and everyone’s sitting on the lawn looking terrified. And all we cared about was making the bus on time,” said Glade, shaking his head at his own younger self.

“The police in your country don’t carry guns,” noted Lachesis. “In Agustria we have military police. It might have had a different ending.”

And they both paused, aware in the same instant of a sudden quiet from the other room. Finn then appeared in the doorway, looking at them both with a certain quiet intensity that might have meant something very good or extremely ill.

“That was the university,” he said. “They’ve completed all the silt tests on our chalk figure.”

“And?” asked Lachesis.

"It's ancient,” Finn resumed his place at the table and reached for his helping of trifle, but Lachesis recognized he was in the mode of distraction where he wouldn’t even taste any of her hard work and held the plate hostage as he talked. "It goes back all the way to the Sorrows. Before the Sorrows, even. It can't be something built to celebrate St. Nova's victory over the pagan hordes... it's something they built themselves. The people of the Old Ways, I mean.”

"That kills your bestiary theory," deadpanned Glade. "I don't think they had paper then. Did they even have writing then?"

"We've been so repelled at the idea that thing might be a horse,” Finn continued, as though he hadn’t even heard, “that I don't think we’ve ever said aloud amongst ourselves what we must suspect it actually is. A dragon."

"A White Dragon?” asked Lachesis, who very much doubted it regardless of what color chalk might be. “Or a _dark_ one?”

“If it was made before the Sorrows, there’s nothing else it can be,” Finn replied. “And we've almost nothing to compare it to, because after St. Nova's victory she and the rest of the holy warriors obliterated every trace of the pagan cults before them. If dead children didn't turn up in bogs now and again we'd know next to nothing of the actual people behind all the legends.”

It took a great deal of willpower for Lachesis not to look at the bright drawings of her child just then.

“But this was something that couldn’t be burned or smashed or melted down,” Finn added, “so all they could do was try to alter it over the years, make it something it wasn’t, until all that was left was monster of a horse that someone eventually just buried in disgust.”

"After its true nature was lost to the mists of time," said Lachesis.

“If you weren’t in hiding you’d probably get some kind of award for this,” Glade offered. “For contributions to culture or something like that.”

“You’ll have to collect it for us, then,” said Finn with a very small smile.

Lachesis, sensing the flood of information was over, at last relinquished the plate of trifle for Finn to enjoy.

“Poor Dorias will be crushed to learn he’s got a symbol of the Old Ways up on his hill,” Glade said after a few moments mulling it over. “He might insist we cover it up again.”

“Let me deal with your Earl, then,” said Lachesis. In that moment she felt she could take on anything.

-x-

They went to the Green-Eyed Lady to celebrate after finishing the lovely dinner that Lachesis made. They didn’t discuss the Old Horse, or Old Dragon, or whatever it ought to be called now. They didn’t discuss the terrible stack of photographs or what had to be done about the tunnel of horrors beneath that vacant lot. The three of them simply had a good time, devoid of purpose beyond amusement, and the novelty of this suffused everything with a warm glow beyond what Anna One’s taps might provide.

This lasted until they hit the town path and Finn could see the very last thing he wanted to see on the western horizon.

"Fire on the mountaintop.” It was a struggle to get out the words. He’d had more than a few drinks and yet his mouth felt excruciatingly dry in that instant.

“What?” asked Lachesis.

"Someone's lit Brigid's Beacon,” Finn tried to explain.

"I don't see anything," said Glade. He no longer sounded amused.

"How can you not see that? The mountain's on fire."

"No," said Glade, in the adamant tone he used whenever Finn was especially weird. ”Nothing is on fire save your imagination."

Part of Finn knew that Glade was correct, that if he turned his thermographic camera toward Brigid's Beacon it wouldn't detect any trace of light or heat either, but in that moment it all came together for him. The map and the outlay of the town, the ruins and the horror chamber, horses and dragons and prayers to dark gods. It came together in the way pieces of information did to form the picture of a truth that nobody else could entirely see.

_General Quan, if we strike right there, right now, this can all be over._

“That’s where we’ll find them,” he said.

“The children?” asked Lachesis, as though somehow tuning in just enough to Finn’s reality. He could see twin images of the warning beacon reflected so perfectly in her eyes…

“They’re at the old fort of Kelves,” he said. "In the tunnels beneath the downs, where the people of the Old Ways went to ground after St. Nova’s victory.”

"Awaiting the rise of the Dark Dragon,” said Lachesis.

"No one would send a search party there; it's too dangerous unless one has a lead saying one _must_ go in."

And he turned to Glade, the man with the badges and clearances and special phone line that was able to make everything happen in this mad chase. Finn could see so clearly what Glade wanted to say, that Finn was both daft _and_ drunk and needed to stand down and sleep it off because there was no fire raging on the ancient summit.

“All right, I’ll bring in the police,” Glade said, each word more reluctant than the last. “I'll tell them we have a tip from Special Forces.”

-x-

The papers and the news broadcasts called it a miracle: nine children between the ages of seven and thirteen rescued successfully from a warren of tunnels by the ancient battleground of Kelves.

"They weren't actually planning to sacrifice the kids," said Glade for the tenth time that morning, for the plot uncovered was less lethal, more cunning, and exponentially more absurd.

“Raising them to be high priests for the Dark Dragon isn’t exactly giving them a better life,” said Lachesis, who knew that if someone had taken Diarmuid to the tunnels in hopes of converting him to the Old Ways she’d want them ripped limb from limb no matter their intention.

In spite of their jubilation over a mystery solved, Lachesis felt out of sorts. She’d awoken early to the aggravating sensation that her breasts were heavy, aching, too tender to comfortably touch— a sensation familiar from her wedding, when she was five and a half weeks into a pregnancy she didn't mention to Finn before he left on deployment the following day.

It seemed they’d resolved the business of the kidnappers just in time.

“How much would it surprise you to hear three of the ringleaders were raised in the Home?” Glade asked then.

“It wouldn’t,” said Finn. “At least if they stand trial, what went on there in the Home should come out as a matter of public record.”

“Oh no. I don’t trust your local justice system any more than I do your local police,” said Lachesis then. “The good people of the Vale will not admit their complicity in giving rise to any of this. We must break the story now while we’re heroes.”

“Heroes,” echoed Finn. “I suppose…it does feel like this began to unspool almost the moment we set foot in the Vale.”

“It’s because of me, of course,” said Lachesis. “I am a direct blood descendant of one of the saints who defeated those of the Old Ways.”

Which was true, though she’d not wanted to speak of it before, the way she hadn’t felt like dwelling on her exalted bloodline so carefully traced through the centuries— not as long as she’d no word of Diarmuid’s health or survival. 

And Glade, not a man for poetry on any ordinary day, gave the case its epitaph.

“It’s almost like this valley's run out of monsters to slay and went about creating its own."

-x-

Finn knew that he must thank the lady farmer out by Brigid’s Beacon for the role she played, deliberate or not, in unraveling both the mystery of the Old Horse and that of the kidnapped children. He took the chestnut mare that Earl Dorias had been so kind to allocate him for pleasure and rode along the ancient country roads, this time without a camera or any other equipment.

Someone with a less keen sense of geography would have assumed he’d passed it by, or simply gotten lost. But Finn knew this was the place where he’d met the lady farmer and received that key piece of evidence, and there was nothing. No rude fence, no cottage, no rows of tended vegetables, no scattered playthings suggesting a cozy domicile.

All that remained to the view of human eyes was a hollow, the foundations of some structure as old as the Kelves Fortress or older. Nothing but a hollow in the green earth and the winds singing eternal across the chalk downs and barrows, from mountains to sea.

**Two years later**

“Now lay it down smooth, right between the lines,” said Lachesis, as she guided Diarmuid’s hands while they freshened up White Lady with a new layer of chalk. Diarmuid showed exquisite care in his work for a child not yet four. Lachesis looked over his ruffled blond head to Finn, who held Nanna as she mashed the chalk-paste between her tiny hands in delight.

“It’s just all fun to her at this age,” said Finn, even as Nanna sent flecks of paste across his favorite blue jacket.

In spite of arrests and trials and a thorough rewriting of the Vale’s history, both ancient and recent, the people soldiered on with their festivals in honor of White Lady, complete with those enigmatic rolling cheese wheels. The Old Dragon was getting its own bit of freshening up to keep its ancient outline from being swallowed again by the turf, and down in the valley a different sort of uncovering was still going on at the site of the old Home, now a forensic excavation marked by tarps and barriers. In the happier scene on White Horse Hill, Earl Dorias and his young daughter reigned over the festivities, both Annas were on the scene selling soft drinks to the workers and Glade was chatting to the red-headed survivor of the Home’s abuses who’d assisted them in bringing that particular story to light.

“So Glade wants me to set up a book signing at The Old Dragon,” said Finn, for the most decrepit pub in the Vale likewise had been made anew in the wake of all their revelations. “Anna Two thinks it’s the right event to help her relaunch the business.”

“Only if that Hubba character isn’t going to be there,” said Lachesis.

“It seems he’s disappeared into the aether,” said Finn. “It does make one wonder what his purpose even was…”

And Lachesis, once and future princess of the lost kingdom of Nordion, present-day wife of a true-crime author in a bucolic village, ran her hands over the white chalk of a symbol of some battle ancient and eternal, content for that moment in her own purpose beneath the sun.

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A word. About three years ago I had the misfortune of attending a motivational talk given by a US Navy SEAL who had the sort of exploits that get turned into a Hollywood movie. Said SEAL claimed that the training given to him and his fellow SEALs make them immune to PTSD, to which I say a) this guy was such a mess he could barely get through his own talk and b) he can believe what he wants but the death notices say otherwise. :(
> 
> The mission that didn't end well is loosely inspired by a move he pulls in the Mitsuki Oosawa FE4 manga that almost took out Travant and so ended the Leonster/Thracia conflict in Quan's favor... only it didn't. Not Finn's fault it failed but that didn't make what happened next any better.


End file.
